Philosophy, literature, science, culture

Day: May 14, 2016

Jane in Full Bloom

by Lex Crane

“Hoc est enim corpus meum.” Climax of the old Latin Mass. Awed folks for centuries, but now… English. Lost much of its majesty and mystery in translation. I grew up during the Latin era, and, as an unbelieving but enthusiastic altar boy, memorized all the Latin required of me. The language was opaque (for the most part) to believer and unbeliever alike. No matter. It was awesome.
An oddity, isn’t it: an unbelieving altar boy? Didn’t get into parochial school until third grade. Eight years old. Missed out on the first two years of catechism. Not so vulnerable after that? Church says that by the time we are in our eighth year, we have entered the age of reason. Could that be why I turned out to be an incurable unbeliever? Not a popular world view. Unbelievers are known to be peculiar. Even suspect. No morals. Who knows what they do in private?

Consider another long ago institution. During the years of the Great Depression, drug stores had soda fountains. Even small neighborhood drug stores. Sold ice cream, ice cream sodas, ice cream cones with sprinkles added as an option. Coffee, lemon phosphate and Coca Cola made on the spot. Coca Cola syrup concentrate pumped into the bottom of a glass, soda added, flowing out of an elegant spigot on demand. See? “Soda Fountain.”
Neighborhood drug stores like this served as community centers for nondrinkers in those long ago days. I didn’t have a nine to five job. A writer. Free to stop in for coffee any time of day. Break in the loneliness of a writer’s day.
Charley ran the soda fountain. Talkative. Had an odd way, as he chatted, of twisting his wedding ring over the knuckle and back as he talked about her. About Marie. He would pull the ring over his knobby knuckle, slip it down to the nail, letting it dangle there for a moment, then point the finger toward the ceiling so that the ring slid down and came to rest on the knuckle.

Humanist Perspectives

Nietzsche

Fallacies

John Dominic Crossan

“Just because the Bible says “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” it doesn’t follow that Mary had a little lamb.”

Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats. scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Words to live by – Douwe Stuurman

what you will love mostis to walkon the earth

Story

Grow a Soul

“One of the attractions of the UU approach to religion and life is caught in the assertion that divinity and spirit are to be found not through blind faith but through finding and sending down roots to the deepest part of one’s unique self. As is true in botany, those roots spread out into the wider community and can nourish us and give us a healthy life. How do we know when we are living in the best place for those roots to grow? In so much as we do indeed “grow a soul” we should consider carefully the garden in which that soul grows.” - Bob Lane

Albert Camus

“For a generous psychology.

We help a person more by giving him a favorable image of himself than by constantly reminding him of his shortcomings. Each individual normally strives to resemble his best image. Can be applied to teaching, to history, to philosophy, to politics. We are for instance the result of twenty centuries of Christian imagery. For two thousand years man has been offered a humiliating image of himself. The result is obvious. Anyway, who can say what we should be if those twenty centuries had clung to the ancient ideal with its beautiful human face.” Albert Camus — Notebooks

Bertrand Russell

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Julius Caesar Lecture

Religion

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -Albert Einstein

Bible Lecture

Reading the Bible FREE

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On Existence

Dad?

Pindar

“O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,

but exhaust the limits of the possible”.

Archives

Archives

Philosophy on Facebook

Samuel Beckett – words

“You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
(Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, 1959, p.418)